No abstract

The development of natural phospholipids for nanostructured drug delivery systems has attracted much attention in the past decades. Lecithin that was derived from naturally occurring in soybeans (SL) has introduced some auspicious accomplishments to the drug carrying aspect, like effectual encapsulation, controlled release, and successful delivery of the curative factors to intracellular regions in which they procure these properties from their flexible physicochemical and biophysical properties, such as large aqueous center and biocompatible lipid, self-assembly, tunable properties, and high loading capacity. Despite the almost perfect properties as a drug carrier, liposome is known to be quite quickly eliminated from the body systems. The surface modification of liposomes has been investigated in many studies to overcome this drawback. In this review, we intensively discussed the surface-modified liposomes that enhancing the targeting, cellular uptake, and therapeutic response. Moreover, the recent applications of soy lecithin-derived liposome, focusing on cancer treatment, brain targeting, and vaccinology, are also summarized.

Despite the fact that nanocarriers as drug delivery systems overcome the limitation of chemotherapy, the leakage of encapsulated drugs during the delivery process to the target site can still cause toxic effects to healthy cells in other tissues and organs in the body. Controlling drug release at the target site, responding to stimuli that originated from internal changes within the body, as well as stimuli manipulated by external sources has recently received significant attention. Owning to the spherical shape and porous structure, dendrimer is utilized as a material for drug delivery. Moreover, the surface region of dendrimer has various moieties facilitating the surface functionalization to develop the desired material. Therefore, multi-stimuli-responsive dendrimers or ‘smart’ dendrimers that respond to more than two stimuli will be an inspired attempt to achieve the site-specific release and reduce as much as possible the side effects of the drug. The aim of this review was to delve much deeper into the recent progress of multi-stimuli-responsive dendrimers in the delivery of anticancer drugs in addition to the major potential challenges.

In this paper ultrafine copper nanoparticles (CuNPs) were prepared from copper salt via chemical reduction method with sodium citrate dispersant and polyvinylalcol (PVA) capping polymer. The colloidal CuNPs were characterized by using UV-Visible spectroscopy, Transmission Electron Microscopy (TEM), and X-ray Diffraction (XRD) techniques. Our obtained results indicated that the CuNPs were produced ranging from 2 to 4 nm in diameter. The colloidal solution at 7 ppm of CuNPs exhibited a powerful antifungal activity against Corticium salmonicolor (C. Salmonicolor). Fungal killing assays showed colloid solutions containing 10 ppm of CuNPs killed entirely the cultured fungus. A highly killing activity against the fungus was also performed when the CuNPs were sprayed on pink disease-infected rubber trees. These positive results may offer a great potential to produce CuNPs-based eco-fungicide for pink disease.

In this paper, we studied the synergistic effect of sodium citrate dispersant and polyvinylpyrrolidone or polyvinylalcol capping polymer on controlling the size of copper nanoparticles (CuNPs) that were prepared by the chemical reduction method. The CuNPs were characterised by using ultraviolet-visible (UV-Vis) spectroscopy, transmission electron microscopy, and X-ray diffraction techniques. The size of the nanoparticles could be predicted via their UV-Vis absorbance. In the presence of capping polymers, the size of CuNPs was significantly changed, ranging from 2 AE 1 to 20 AE 7 nm with and without sodium citrate dispersant, respectively. Moreover, surface plasmon resonance of ultrafine CuNPs (2 nm in diameter) could be observed in the short wavelength region by using UV-Vis spectra. Our finding, could offer a new synthetic approach to the production of highly stable, small-sized CuNPs.